Crop yield is a factor that significantly affects the health and well-being of entire populations. As crops mature, they encounter a wide variety of environmental stresses that can have a significantly negative effect on crop yield, and a related negative political and economic impact on the populations that rely on production from such crops. For example, excessive heat, drought, wind, and hail may all have damaging effects on crop yield for a wide variety plants. Many efforts have been made to improve the resiliency of crops to such negative environmental impacts, but development of affordable and thus widely distributable and successful solutions remains a challenge.
Moreover, while solar energy production technology continues to develop and provides hope for renewable energy production, its current wide-spread use has many challenges. For instance, infrastructure expenses, real estate expenses, and real estate availability all create challenges to wide-spread deployment and use of solar collection systems. While much real estate is devoted to crop production, the negative impact that traditional solar collection assemblies would have on crop fields if placed on the same real estate has prevented their combined use, despite the wide availability of such real estate.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide methods for optimizing crop yield by mitigating damage caused to crops by excessive heat, drought, wind, and hail, while simultaneously making the real estate housing such crops available for solar energy production.